A visit to New Mexico and Arizona

In this second part of our road trip to San Antonio, my wife Sarah and I reluctantly departed Desert Hot Springs and the fine dining and rich street walking at Palm Springs to drive east on Hwy. 10 toward Tucson, Arizona. Our superb breakfast at Townie Bagel Bakery Cafe and two outstanding dinners, one at The Rooster and The Pig, and the other at the Thai Smile Palm Springs, left us with deep, lasting impressions of the place on top of the dramatic surrounding mountain range, wind farms and bristling, rich cactus showcase.

Climbing over a series of passes, punctuated with giant boulders in the Little Chuckwalla Mountains, we worked our way through Blythe and across the Arizona desert that was frequently being threaded by mile-long freight trains. Another pass through the Dome Rock Mountains brought us to Quartzite and onward on Hwy. 10 through Phoenix.

Our grandson and his wife and four kids live in Sahuarita, south of Tucson, so we set up a room at the Voyager hotel in Tucson.

We met at the Guadalajara Restaurant for dinner in Tucson, an evening that was largely about trying to keep four young kids—the oldest being 7—from turning the dinner table upside-down. But the food was great, and the warm, friendly folks there put a positive cap on our all-too-brief visit.

Meanwhile, the folks at the Voyager Hotel called to tell us they had an “upgrade” for us because their computer door key system was askew. As we arrived at our room, after having to get our key from a security guard at an entry kiosk, we learned it was actually a mobile home in a sprawling mobile home park that felt like a warehouse: No lobby, no restaurant, no people mingling about—just cold, dark rows of unlit metal homes.

So we were glad to check out of that place and get back on Hwy. 10 east into New Mexico to see our long-time friends Amanada and Phil, who live in the mountainous mining town of Silver City.

Amanda was once a reporter for The Pajaronian and Phil is from Prunedale, so we had a lot of catching up to do. 

Silver City boasts historical ties with old west gunfighters, lawmen like Wyatt Earp, Dangerous Dan Tucker, outlaw Billy the Kid and Geronimo, Apache warrior and medicine man. Silver City is next to the ancient Gila Cliff Dwellings dated 800 B.C., and has the third largest open pit copper mine in the world. 

At 6,000 feet, perched on the edge of the Gila National Forest, Silver City is home to the Western New Mexico University, started in 1893. With just over 10,000 people, the old town is a charming scene cut right out of an old western painting, with striking early day buildings, brick and wood facades and intriguing, steep winding streets.

Phil and Amanda treated us to lunch downtown at Jalisco Cafe on Bullard Street. Afterwards we strolled through town and down to the Silva Creek that runs through what once was Main Street and is known by locals as “the Big Ditch.”

In part 3, we head to El Paso to check out Pancho Villa’s stash house where agents found $500,000 in U.S. currency and gold coins in a raid of the house by U.S. Customs in 1915.